The audiovisual installation of UN.KNOWN SPACES in Vienna was composed of two integral components:
The visual component with 18 flatscreen-monitors organized in 6 groups consisting of 3 monitors each (Vienna, NYC, Nairobi). On these monitors the visitors could observe and via headphones listen to the 66 hands of 66 individuals on 3 continents performing their subjetive live-maps. The visual component of this installation was generated by cooperation of the media-artist Vanessa Gageos.
The auditive component consisted of 9+3 speakers. A generative algorithmic composition created in collaboration with Samuel Gfeller, dislpayed rhythmical patterns from an archive of marimba-recordings, immitating the different rhythms and melodies of languages to 9 loudspeakers. On 3 extra-speakers mounted on stands on head-level, the composition reflected an actual discussion between people. Like this, the most important „knowledge-moments“ out of the 33 interviews with UN-officials in Europe, America and Africa became experienceable.

As integral part of our artwork, we created a „living archive“. Here the audience could experience the entire process of creation as a multi-media-installation with 3 birdhouses, 3 archive-tables and a rhizomatic network-drawing, presenting the complex web of interactions beween people that we knitted through our two-years period of research on three continents.

With UN.KNOWN SPACES, we turn our attention to three singular building-complexes, located on three different continents and hosted by three very different communities: the United Nations headquarters in Nairobi, New York City, and Vienna. Our interest is to explore specific localizations of this 193-state community as an extended reflection on its own written foundation (the UN Charter) and its strategies for dealing with the inherent Babylonian confusion of its constituent states. Based on a thorough investigation of these four UN-architectures and their peripheries, we seek to explore the physical and virtual spaces rhizomatically interwoven within these locales.